


The Third Station

by johnny cade (johnnycake)



Series: Switchblades and Leather [38]
Category: The Outsiders (1983), The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Gen, Police Violence, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 13:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16787671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/johnnycake/pseuds/johnny%20cade
Summary: Dallas gets hauled into the station after Johnny and Ponyboy run away after Bob's death.





	The Third Station

**Author's Note:**

> oh yay!! i got somethin' out in a good amount of time!! yay!!

The police station’s interrogation room was as sterile as a hospital room. In fact, even more so because there wasn’t a bed or any of the machinery that would be in a hospital. All that existed within was a metal stainless steel table, a matching chair and a large one-way mirror taking up most of the wall behind the chair. Dallas had been in police interrogation rooms plenty of times and they all looked the same. All sterile. All silver and black. Sometimes the tiles on the floors and walls were white, but that was the only difference. Everything was just a cookie cutter cut out of the one before. Even the interrogation rooms in New York had looked exactly like the ones in Tulsa.

The police had picked him up walking home from Buck’s house. He’d just lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke at the sky, watching it obscure the stars, when headlights illuminated the world around him from behind. He turned and the flashing blue and red lights on top of the squad car told him immediately what was going on. Any other time, he would’ve sighed in exasperation, frustrated he was being picked up yet again for no reason at all. But there was a reason and he knew the reason and he was more worried about Johnny and Ponyboy’s safety and his ability to lie to the police than about whatever they might do to him to get the truth out of him.

“Mr. Winston?” the cop driving the car said, getting out of the car, one hand on the door of the car, the other on his waist, just above his gun.

This time Dallas did sigh, rolling his eyes and dropping his shoulders, looking at the sky. It was all a show, but it was what he normally would’ve done. He wanted to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary. “You really gonna make my day harder than it already is?” he asked, his tone as frustrated as his body language suggested.

“We can do this the easy way or hard way, Mr. Winston,” the cop replied, shaking his head.

Dally sighed and slumped over to the car, climbing into the back seat as the officer held it open for him. He stared out the barred windows as they drove out of the neighborhood and headed towards the precinct near the center of town. The car stopped and the cop held the door open for him again. He got out, thanking them sarcastically, before following them into the building and into the interrogation room and there he stayed for the next hour, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for them to come back and start talking to him, asking him all the questions about Johnny and Ponyboy whereabouts and activities of the night before that he knew were coming.

As if on cue, the door opened and the officer that had picked him up walked in, holding a manila folder. He sat down in the other chair across from Dallas without saying a word and slowly opened the manila folder, looking through sheets of paper covered in words that he couldn’t read from this angle and probably wouldn’t have made sense to him anyway even if he could.

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Winston?” the officer asked, his eyes flicking up to him briefly as he spoke, still rifling through the papers.

Dally shrugged, slouching in the chair. “How should I know when you ain’t told me?”

The officer looked at him again and sighed, closing the folder. “Because I know you’re close with Johnny Cade and Ponyboy Curtis. And I think you know exactly what happened with them and the boy, Bob Sheldon, last night.”

Dallas was quiet for a moment. He wanted to lie. He wanted to tell the officer he had no idea what was going on right now. But he knew that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t help anything. He took a breath and said, “Oh you mean how Johnny killed that piece of shit who had been assaultin’ him for the last six months? And Ponyboy just happened to be there when it happened cause the shit was tryin’ to drown him? Yeah, I know about that.”

The police officer frowned. “There is no proof that Bob Sheldon has assaulted Johnny Cade,” he replied. “But Johnny Cade killed Bob last night. He murdered someone. That is illegal. Very illegal. We need to bring him to justice.”

Dallas laughed then. “No proof?” he asked, then frowned, leaning forward, glaring at the officer. “What do you call that scar on his face then, huh?”

“He harms himself, does he not?” the officer replied quickly. “Couldn’t it be from that?”

Dally clenched his hands into fists and this time didn’t reply, telling himself over and over again not to act on his impulse to punch the officer. It wouldn’t help anything either. He would land in jail and then he wouldn’t be able to warn Johnny and Ponyboy if the cops decided to go after them in any sort of accurate way.

“They seem to have disappeared in the night,” the officer went on, pulling Dallas out of his thoughts. He clasped his hands in front of him on the silver steel table, leaning towards Dally. “Do you have any idea where they might have gone?”

Dally shrugged. “I dunno, man,” he said, smiling and laughing again. “They could be anywhere. This is a big country. Fifty states. Several bordering ours. And lotsa cities in Oklahoma. You might wanna get on that if you wanna find them.”

The officer then did something that startled him. He slammed his fist down on the table, moved around it faster than Dally could track with his eyes, grabbed him up out of his chair, and slammed him up against the wall. “I’ve had just about enough of your smart mouth,” he growled in Dally’s face. “I know you know where they are. And you ain’t leavin’ here until you tell me.”

Dally was having a hard time breathing, the officer’s arm was pressed up against his neck, slightly crushing his windpipe in the process. He let out a soft gasping breath and said before he could stop himself, “Why would I tell a pig like you?”

The cop punched him in the face, then again in the stomach. He felt the wind knocked out of him as he fell involuntarily to his knees, gasping for air. The cop knelt down next to him, grabbing him by his hair and lifting his head, their faces inches apart as he hissed, “Because I got all night to work you over and I ain’t gonna stop until you tell me where they are.”

Dally grinned into the officer’s face. “Eat me.”

The officer punched him again. And again. Dally let him, trying to come up with a good enough lie the officer just might believe as he did so. It wasn’t until he was covered in bruises and had a busted lip that he finally said, “Alright, alright, alright, I’ll tell ya where they are. Just...stop hittin’ me.”

To anyone who knew him, they would know that this was all an act. Dallas Winston could take hits and punches until he was covered and couldn’t move. He would keep on coming. But he wanted to leave the stupid interrogation room that looked like every other he’d ever been in in his life. He wanted to go home, have a cigarette, and sleep. He was done with fooling around.

The officer seemed more worn out than Dallas was and half collapsed into the chair on the other side of the interrogation table, lighting his own cigarette as he waited for Dally to climb into his own chair and tell him exactly what he wanted to hear. Dallas pretended to gasp for air, pretended to shake in fear, before he finally pretended to swallow nervously and gasped out, “Houston. Texas. Ponyboy said something about an uncle in Houston.”

The officer blew his smoke at the ceiling, staring at it with a smug smile on his face for a moment before he finally said, “Thank you, Mr. Winston.” He put it out in an ash tray on the table that Dally hadn’t noticed before. “Now...was that so hard?” The officer was still grinning that same smug grin and, again, he clenched his hands into fists to keep himself from mouthing off again.

The officer left again and when he returned, he told him he could go. Dally walked past him, keeping his eyes averted, keeping up the act of being scared and kowtowed. He kept up the act until he left the precinct and was halfway home. Then he pulled out his pack of cigarettes again, pulled one out and lit one, then blowing the smoke at the stars like he had before, he grinned as he took a deep breath in, muttering under his breath in a gleeful voice, “Sucker!”

He was covered in bruises, bleeding from several different places, but he’d done his job and he’d done it well. Johnny was still safe. Ponyboy was safe too, but Johnny had been and always would be his number one priority. In every aspect of life.

Johnny was safe. He was safe.

And that was all that mattered.

**Author's Note:**

> really happy with how this turned out <3


End file.
